Chain of Iron

There was a soft murmur in his head. It was Daisy, reading Dickens.



“Of late, very often. There was a long hard time when I kept far from me, the remembrance, of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth. But, since my duty has not been incompatible with the admission of that remembrance, I have given it a place in my heart.”

 

A real memory came then, strong and dark as tea, of another room, a time when he had tossed and turned, and Daisy had read aloud. The memory was like the surge of a wave; it lifted and broke under him, and was gone. He reached for it, but it had evaporated in the darkness; exhausted, he could no longer push against the force of his own mind. The voice in the back of his head returned like a flood. He had seen Grace that day, and he had not been able to stop himself from kissing her. He did love her. It was a surety that felt like the closing of a cell door.

“James?” Cordelia had paused in her reading; she sounded worried. “Are you all right? No bad dreams?”

The night was a canyon, black and depthless; James ached for things he could not name or define. “Not yet,” he said. “No bad dreams.”

LONDON: GOLDEN SQUARE



The killer could move so swiftly now that mundanes did not see him; he was a shade, flickering past them on the streets. No more would he have to hide, or discard his bloody clothes in abandoned buildings—though it amused him no end that the Shadowhunters had kept a watch on the abandoned Limehouse factory as if they expected his return.

He brushed past crowds like the shadow of a passing cloud. Sometimes he paused, to look around and smile, to gather himself. There would be blood at dawn, but whose would spill? A group of patrolling Shadowhunters moved past him and onto Brewer Street. He grinned ferociously—what fun it would be to separate one from the pack and take him down, leaving him dead in his own blood before the others had even noticed.

Even as he reached for his blade, another Shadowhunter passed—a young one, tall, brown-haired. This one was alone, watchful. Not part of a patrol. He was walking into Golden Square, his back straight, head held high. A voice whispered in the back of the killer’s mind: a name.

Thomas Lightwood.

PART TWO

BY THE SWORD

In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep

falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed,

Then He openeth the ears of men,

and sealeth their instruction,

That He may withdraw man from his purpose,

and hide pride from man.

He keepeth back his soul from the pit, and

his life from perishing by the sword.

—Job 33:15

17



PROPHET OF EVIL



Prophet of evil I ever am to myself: forced for ever into

sorrowful auguries that I have no power to hide from my

own heart, no, not through one night’s solitary dreams.

—Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

The city slept, beneath its blanket of snow. Every footstep Thomas took seemed to echo down empty streets, beneath the awnings of shops, past houses where people lay warm and safe inside, never knowing he paced past their thresholds.

He had walked up from Mayfair through Marylebone, past closed shops whose windows glittered with Christmas displays, until he reached Regent’s Park. The freezing rain had turned the trees into elaborate ice sculptures. There were a few carriages on the Euston Road as the hours turned toward dawn; doctors making emergency calls, perhaps, or traveling to or from late-night shifts at the hospitals.

It had been a long night, both because of the rain that had begun shortly after midnight, and because as he passed along Brewer Street, he had nearly run into a patrol of Shadowhunters: four or five men bundled in gear and heavy coats. He slipped away from them, through Golden Square. The last thing he wanted was to be caught, and likely censured. He could not—would not—rest until the killer was apprehended.

He could not have entirely explained what drove his restless determination. James was certainly a part of it—James, tied up in his own bedroom all night while their friends stood guard downstairs, prepared for something none of them believed possible. James, who bore the weight of a heritage darker than any shadows. It never seemed to touch Lucie, but James’s eyes were always haunted.

There was only one other person Thomas had known with eyes like that. Not golden eyes, but dark, and so sad—he had always been drawn to that dichotomy, he thought, of the cruelty of Alastair’s words, and the sadness with which he said them. Sorrowful eyes and a vicious tongue. Tell me, he had always wanted to say, what broke your heart, and let such bitterness spill out?

On and on Thomas strode, down through Bloomsbury, barely noticing how numb and cold his feet had grown, driven on by the feeling that just around the next corner, his quarry would be waiting. But there was nobody about except for the occasional bobby on his beat, or cloaked and bundled night workers trudging home, their faces invisible but no sense of threat coming from them. He passed the Covent Garden market, just beginning to open, tall stacks of wooden crates lining its colonnades as the wagons rolled in and out, carrying flowers, fruit, and even Christmas trees, whose boughs filled the air with the scent of pine.

As Thomas began to loop back west again toward Soho, the sky seemed to be growing perceptibly lighter. He stopped short in front of the statue of King George II at the center of Golden Square, its pale marble almost luminous under the deep, just-before-dawn blue of the sky. Somewhere, an early riser was playing the piano, and the mournful notes echoed through the square. Dawn was moments away. Back at Curzon Street, they would soon have their answer. Either there had been no deaths tonight—in which case James would still be a suspect—or the killer would have struck again, in which case they would know James was innocent. How strange, not to know what to wish for.

Suddenly Thomas wanted nothing more than to return to his friends. He started walking more briskly, rubbing his gloved hands to warm his stiff fingers as the glow of yellow and pink over the treetops signaled the sun’s approach.

Then a scream shattered the stillness. Thomas broke into a run without thinking, his training propelling him toward the sound before he had a moment to hesitate. He prayed that it was a fight, maybe drunks stumbling out of a pub, or a thief snatching a handbag from an early-morning commuter—

He skidded around a corner onto Sink Street. A woman was sprawled across the threshold of a terraced town house, half in and half out of the iced-over garden. She was facedown on the ground, her garments streaked in blood, gray hair spilling onto the snow. He looked wildly around, but saw no one else. He knelt and gathered the woman into his arms, turning her head to see her face—

It was Lilian Highsmith. He knew her—everyone did. She was an elder of the Clave, a respected figure—and kindly, too. She had kept peppermints in her pocket to give to children. He remembered her handing them to him when he was a little boy, her thin hands ruffling his hair.

She wore a morning dress, as if she had not expected to be outside. The fabric was slashed, blood pouring from multiple gashes in the material. Bloody foam flecked her lips—she was still breathing, he realized. With shaking hands, he drew out his stele, desperately carving iratze after iratze onto her skin. Each flickered and vanished, like a stone sinking into water.